Back To The Future- Some

Back To The Future- Some of you have amazed me by actually remembering what I did in my earlier life - a fact that never ceases to astound me.

I started in radio when I was 16 years old, at KEYJ in Jamestown, ND. After working for six years in North Dakota, I turned up (through circumstances that would make a very long post by themselves) at age 22 working at KSTP-AM in St. Paul. I started as an intern on the Don Vogel show, on the late Vogel's first hitch at KSTP. From there, I became a producer/engineer/sidekick, and then got a shot at doing my own show, "The Mitch Berg Show", on the weekend graveyard shift. The show was a lot of things; a weekly car crash, the biggest ego boost I'd ever had (people called, to talk politics with me!) and, although I'd only been a right-winger for maybe three years, it was conservative.

Now, this was long before "talk radio" and "conservative" became synonyms, a good two years before Rush Limbaugh left Sacramento to go nationwide. And it was the most fun I'd ever had. I could have stayed there, making $12K a year and doing comedy bits with Vogel and kibitzing about politics with the bar rush crowd forever.

But life moved on. Most of the staff at KSTP got fired one day; that was how Hubbard Broadcasting used to do business, although you'd never know it from the way most of KSTP's current staff has been working at their jobs for over a decade, now. I went on to other stations - KDWB, WDGY, even KFAI for a while. But it was never the same. And eventually radio just stopped being fun, and then stopped paying the bills. So I moved on. I got over it. I didn't want that any more.

Last fall - fifteen years, two careers, a marriage and divorce, two kids and a lot of life later, the old bug hit me. I think I was listening to some fill-in host, and thought "Criminy - even I was better than that". I called KSTP last fall, and asked if they ever, ever needed a fill-in talk show host, to give me a call.

Four months later, they did. I'm filling in for Bob Davis tonight. 10-midnight central, on AM1500.

It'll be interesting - either on its own terms, or in that "watching crashes at the NASCAR race" kind of way, but interesting in any case.

It'll be the first talk show I've done in almost 16 years. It could very well be the last I ever do. But it's interesting - while I never really liked the radio industry, and grew to really detest a lot of people in the business and the conditions that make them what they turn into (I'm talking top40 people, here), there's a rush to being on the air that is like nothing else - better than bungee jumping, better than driving really fast, or biking down a really long hill or busting off a magazine from a 1928 Thompson...you get the picture.

So tune in. However it turns out, it should be quite the event. I'll blog about it tomorrow.